77. I predicted he wouldn't serve out his term. This election was too close. I agree that pure.....

socialism is as reckless as runaway capitalism, and who the hell wants to invest in a country where the government could arbitrarily seize your family business for the "national interest"? Moises Naim is a regular guest on NPR, and I find he's pretty evenhanded when it comes to reporting, and I found this article fascinating.

January 8, 2013, 3:12 PM
by Moises Naim, Scholar, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"Last month, Jorge Botti, the head of Fedecámaras, Venezuela's business federation, explained that unless the government supplies more dollars to pay for imports, shortages -- from food to medicine -- would be inevitable. "What we will give Fedecámaras is not more dollars but more headaches," replied acting president Nicolas Maduro, the heir apparent to the Chavista regime (and Hugo Chávez's vice president).

Maduro is correct. Crushing headaches will soon be inevitable across the country, including within the private sector but especially among the poor. President Chávez has bequeathed the nation an economic crisis of historic proportions.

The crisis includes a fiscal deficit approaching 20 percent of the economy (in the cliff-panicking United States it is 7 percent), a black market where a U.S. dollar costs four times more than the government-determined exchange rate, one of the world's highest inflation rates, a swollen number of public sector jobs, debt 10 times larger than it was in 2003, a fragile banking system and the free fall of the state-controlled oil industry, the country's main source of revenue."

In a country where the leader has unprecedented unilateral powers, I find the deteriorating conditions in Venezuela quite shocking. Unlike here, Congressional or Parliamentary interference is fairly nonexistent, and yet the president's leftist critics revere Chavez, and abhor Pres. Obama.

Another Socialist leader, Francois Hollande, finds himself in pretty much the same predicament, and he was only elected a year ago. I predict that once Venezuelans stop blaming the US for everything from deliberately infecting Chavez with cancer to the shortage of toilet paper, they will turn their sights to their own leadership, and Maduro will be forced out.